In contemporary usage, "hope" tends to mean a soft, slightly passive wishing—*I hope the weather is nice tomorrow; I hope things work out*. In the *Mahāyāna-sūtrālaṃkāra* (《大乘莊嚴經論》, T1604), the same word is re-engineered into something far more exacting. Hope is not a feeling that drifts toward a single horizon. It is a *structured, five-direction aspiration* that a bodhisattva (菩薩, a being committed to full awakening for the sake of all beings) sustains at all times. To study it is to see that this tradition takes hope seriously—not as daydream, but as one of the most disciplined activities a practitioner can be engaged in.
What This Concept Is About
The text offers a striking compressed verse, then unpacks it:
「六增及六減，成生與進地，大覺是五處，希望有五種種。」 *"Six increases and six decreases; the maturing of beings and progress through the grounds; great awakening as the fifth — hope arises at these five places."*
The prose commentary then names each of the five. Read carefully, this is not five varieties of "wanting." It is a single continuous aspiration *applied* across five specific sites of training, and those five sites cover the full span of the bodhisattva path: from moment-to-moment cultivation, to one's own stuck patterns, to the welfare of others, to one's developmental stage, to the ultimate goal. Hope, in this technical sense, is the connective tissue of practice — it is what keeps every step oriented toward the whole.
The Five Sites
1. Hope for the six pāramitās to grow (希望六度增長). The six perfections (六度 / *ṣaṭ-pāramitā*) — generosity (*dāna*), ethical conduct (*śīla*), forbearance (*kṣānti*), joyful effort (*vīrya*), meditative absorption (*dhyāna*), and discriminating wisdom (*prajñā*) — are the structural practices of the bodhisattva. Hope here is *for one's own cultivation to deepen*. Notice: the object is not "I want to be a better person" in some vague way, but specifically the growth of these six specific trainings. The aspiration is concrete enough to be checked against.
2. Hope for the six obscurations to decrease (希望六蔽損減). The six obscurations (六蔽) are the inverse of each pāramitā — stinginess obstructs generosity, transgression obstructs ethics, anger obstructs forbearance, laziness obstructs effort, mental dissipation obstructs concentration, and ignorance obstructs wisdom. The text deliberately pairs this with the first item: the path requires not only that what *should grow* grows, but that what *obstructs* shrinks. Hope, then, is bidirectional: it aims both at increasing what is wholesome and at decreasing what blocks it. This is significant. Many contemporary treatments of aspiration speak only of "growth" and ignore the painstaking, unglamorous work of diminishing what is in the way. This text refuses that omission.
3. Hope for beings to mature (希望成熟眾生). The verse compresses this to two characters (*成生*); the commentary expands it to "成熟眾生." Hope here is no longer directed at the practitioner — it is directed outward, at the ripening, the coming-to-maturity, of other beings. A bodhisattva who only hopes for their own improvement is, by this framing, not yet fully exercising hope. The aspiration must include others.
4. Hope for advancing through the grounds (希望勝進諸地). The bodhisattva path is articulated into a sequence of ten stages (十地) — from the Ground of Joy through the Ground of Dharma Cloud — each marking a deepening in understanding, compassion, and skillful means. Hope here is *for one's own forward movement along this developmental map*. It is the aspiration to keep progressing — not staying put at the level one has reached.
5. Hope for unsurpassed awakening (希望無上菩提). The verse's *大覺* (great awakening) and the commentary's *無上菩提* (anuttarā-bodhi) point to the same destination: complete, perfect buddhahood. This is the ultimate horizon that organizes the whole trajectory. It is not a "bonus" added on top of the first four; it is the orienting star by which the previous four become intelligible as a path.
A Note on Form
The text uses 希望 primarily, with the variant 悕望 appearing in one verse—same meaning, different character. It does *not* simply equate hope with the bodhisattva vow (願 / *praṇidhāna*), though the two are clearly kin. A vow crystallizes at a moment; hope, as the text describes it, is the *持續期求*—*sustained aspiration*—that one returns to again and again across the whole journey. And the related terms that appear in nearby verses—*願樂*, *樂求* ("joyful seeking," classified into four kinds: collected joy, seeing the meaning, equal and undiscriminating, and presence-with-the-present-cause)—are noted by commentators as *adjacent* to hope but not identical. The *sūtrālaṃkāra* itself treats hope as a specific, well-bounded category: the practitioner reorients toward these five targets as a continuous practice.
A Walk-Through in Everyday Life
Take a recognizable contemporary figure—let's call her Jia, in her early forties, working in a demanding professional environment, raising two children, married, and quietly trying to keep some kind of inner practice alive. Let's see how the five hopes might run through an ordinary month.
Hope 1 — Growth of the pāramitās. Jia has been trying to meditate for fifteen minutes most mornings, irregularly. If she sits down and cultivates this hope, she is not merely wishing *that she will become a calmer, kinder person*. She is aspiring to a specific widening: that her generosity (with her time, her attention, her money) becomes less pinched; that her ethics under pressure at work hold; that her patience with her seven-year-old deepens instead of eroding; that her capacity for sustained effort in her meditation actually grows; that her concentration stabilizes; that her understanding of how the mind constructs its world sharpens. Each item is concrete enough to notice. The hope serves as a steering gaze: when she catches herself, the question is not "did I have a good meditation?" but "did *this* facet of the six grow today?"
Where most people go wrong on this one: they collapse hope into "becoming a better person" and lose all the diagnostic specificity. The six-perfections structure gives something a generic wish for self-improvement lacks: edges. You can see whether *generosity* grew or whether *just forbearance* grew. Buddhist psychology refuses the comfort of undifferentiated virtue-talk.
Hope 2 — Decrease of the obscurations. Same morning, but turned inside. While she hopes the six grow, she simultaneously hopes the six inversions shrink. She hopes the stinginess that flares when her spouse doesn't notice her effort loosens. She hopes the small ethical shortcuts she takes in her work emails (a half-truth in a thread she'd rather not start) get rarer. She hopes the irritation she swallows *less often* becomes irritation she *neither swallows nor expresses*. She hopes the lazy evening scroll—that second hour of "relaxing" that is actually neither restful nor restoration—loses some grip. She hopes the days when her mind skitters across five windows at once become fewer. She hopes the half-formed judgments she makes about colleagues who think differently soften.
The crucial point the text makes by listing these alongside the growth items: hope is *not only additive*. Half of it is the disinvestment of attention, energy, time, and identity from patterns that block the path. Many contemporary self-improvement frameworks only have the growth side — they tell you to *add* meditation, *add* journaling, *add* gratitude. Hope, in this teaching, also demands that things *subtract*. Imagine your inner life as an installation directory: hope becomes the willingness to delete, to uninstall, to let go of the running processes you no longer need.
Where most people go wrong on this one: they treat the "decrease" item as merely negative or punitive. But it is a *direction of aspiration*. You're not beating yourself up for having obscurations; you're hoping they get smaller, the way a garden plot hopes weeds get sparser.
Hope 3 — The maturing of beings. Jia turns, in this moment, away from her own scoresheet. She hopes her daughter's emerging selfhood meets enough steady care that it can ripen. She hopes her team at work can grow past needing her constant intervention. She hopes the friends around her who are going through difficult passages come through them not unscathed (that would not be maturing) but *more capable of being present* on the other side. She does not have to *do* anything specific to "help" in this exact frame; the *aspiration itself* — that others come to maturity — is the practice. And critically, she does not personalize their maturation: she is not making her worth contingent on whether they succeed. The hope is unconditional in the sense that it points to their maturation, not to her visibility in the process.
Where most people go wrong on this one: they substitute *control* for hope. Hoping someone's maturation occurs is not the same as engineering it. The bodhisattva-text here keeps a distinction — observable later in the training as the difference between skillful means (*upāya*) and grasping — that is rarely honored in everyday conversations about "helping."
Hope 4 — Progress through the grounds. Jia does not imagine herself always at the same place. The hope is for movement along a developmental axis. This is subtle: many practitioners, and many modern self-improvers, conceptualize practice as "stay on the path" — but the text's language of *勝進* (advancing, going forward) and *諸地* (the various grounds) implies that there are recognizable *stages* along the way, and that hope is for moving from one to the next. In our walk-through, this might look like: she hopes the stage where she can sit for forty-five minutes with stability and kindness comes; later, that the stage where she can be with suffering without flinching opens; eventually, that the stage where wisdom is so integrated that it expresses without contrivance arrives. The grounds are not destinations one "arrives at and stays"; the hope is dynamic.
In contemporary terms, one could map this onto developmental psychology's stages (Loevinger's ego development, Kegan's stages of adult development, Fowler's stages of faith) — *only with a caveat*: those frameworks describe cognitive and emotional capacities, but the bodhisattva grounds include an ethical and contemplative dimension that those frameworks don't always reach, and they are explicitly oriented toward full awakening, which no Western developmental scheme posits. The analogy is partial, never identity.
Hope 5 — Unsurpassed bodhi. Highest and most abstract, but indispensable. Without this, the previous four become merely competent self-management. The hope for *無上菩提* is the hope that all the capacities cultivated in hope #1, all the weights released in hope #2, all the maturing of others in hope #3, all the progress through stages in hope #4 — *all of it* — is in service of an awakening so total that there is no higher. In daily life this hope may be the quietest, most invisible of the five. It is rarely felt as a single dramatic longing; it is more like a low background note that doesn't go away. A practitioner can lose sight of it during a hard day or week or year. The text's inclusion of it, alongside the more tangible items, insists it is not optional.
Where most people go wrong on this one: they treat #5 as grandiose and skip it, finding #1 and #2 "realistic" enough. But the text's logic is that without #5, #1–#4 have no organizing grammar — they risk becoming self-help.
Why Contemporary People Need This
If you live in a culture with a heavy emphasis on personal achievement and a thin vocabulary for aspiration, you are statistically likely to develop what might be called a *flat hope* — a single-direction wanting that points, say, at "career success" or "being a good parent" or "getting healthy." The bodhisattva teaching in T1604 is corrective here: it says a healthy hope is *multi-directional*, and that all five directions must be kept in view for the structure to bear weight.
This is, in some ways, an early discovery that contemporary work on goal-setting is circling around. Researchers on goal-content distinguish intrinsic goals (relating, community, growth) from extrinsic ones (image, status), and find the former reliably associated with higher well-being and lower distress — though the literature is correlational and there is genuine debate about cultural specificity. The five hopes, similarly, are mostly intrinsic; only #4 has any "achievement" sound to it, and even that is a stage on a developmental road, not a position to be held. Importantly, the bodhisattva framework goes *further* than goal-content research: it includes the negative-direction hope (#2) and insists on others (#3) and an open-ended horizon (#5). The analogy is suggestive, not identity — it would be misleading to claim "science proves the bodhisattva's five hopes are correct." What one can responsibly say: contemporary research on human flourishing has independently come to conclusions partially paralleling this ancient structure, while leaving dimensions (loss-as-direction, others-as-primary-object) undertheorized.
There is also a difficulty the structure addresses. Modern life tends to offer *binary* hope: the project succeeds or fails; the relationship works or doesn't; the country goes well or badly. Buddhists in the *sūtrālaṃkāra* tradition routinely inhabit a form of hope structured by *interdependent* and *patient* trajectories. Their hope for a pāramitā growing does not have a deliverable date. Their hope for obscurations decreasing may take a lifetime. Their hope for others' maturing is by definition not in their hands. Their hope for progress through stages unfolds slowly. Their hope for full awakening is, by its very meaning, the longest view available. To live with all five simultaneously is to train a mind that can sustain long arcs of intention without burning out and without flinching.
There is an analogy — with serious limits — to certain systems-design intuitions: a robust system is not optimized on a single metric but tracks several. If you only optimize for one — say, performance — the system eventually breaks under fragility. If you only optimize for stability, nothing happens. The bodhisattva's five-hope structure is a multi-objective orientation that holds weight precisely because no single hope is doing all the work. But the analogy breaks down: this is not an optimization problem. It is a lifelong practice of reorientation. And "five" here is not a complete enumeration — it is the named sites of hope from this particular text. Other texts in this tradition point to additional aspects of the bodhisattva's intention (vow, compassion, wisdom) that interlock with hope but are not reducible to it.
Common Misreadings and Clarifications
Misreading 1: Hope = wish. The contemporary English word "hope" floats through contexts like *I hope it rains tomorrow* (pale wish) and *I hope the surgery goes well* (anxious wishing) and *I hope you get better soon* (affective gesture). None of these carry the technical load of the bodhisattva's 希望. The text's hope is structured (five named sites), ongoing (described as *持續*—sustained), and oriented to cultivation (it tracks developmental movement). It would be more accurate to translate it as *aspiration*, though that English word, too, carries its own baggage (loftier, grander). Perhaps the cleanest framing: bodhisattva-hope is *structured, sustained, cultivation-aligned aspiration*. Keep this in mind when reading any translation that flattens to "hope."
Misreading 2: Hope = vow. Vow (願 / *praṇidhāna*) is *adjacent* to hope in the same broad family — indeed, the *sūtrālaṃkāra* uses 悕望 and 起願 in close proximity in one verse — but the texts themselves do not collapse them. A vow is a sincere commitment made at a moment; hope is the sustained carrying-forward of aspiration. There can be vows (a bodhisattva's resolve at awakening; a monastic ordination vow) without hope (if the practitioner never turns that vow toward the five sites of practice), and hope can be cultivated without a formally articulated vow. The five hopes are about *present-moment orientation*, not about pledge-taking.
Misreading 3: Only #5 matters. A serious misreading is to skip the first four and jump to "I hope I attain buddhahood, or I hope I become enlightened." This makes #5 a slogan detached from practice. The text's order is significant: #5 is the orienting horizon, but #1–#4 are the active sites. To hold only #5 is to have a devotional sentiment; to cultivate only #1–#4 without #5 is to be a skilled practitioner missing the integrating grammar.
Misreading 4: Only #1 and #2 matter. The mirror image error: hyper-practical practitioners who treat hope as just "I want to be less reactive and more skillful." This collapses out the other-direction (others) and the developmental/ultimate direction. You end up with a competent self-manager, not a bodhisattva.
Misreading 5: Hope is a feeling you either have or don't have. A quiet but persistent mistake. The text treats hope as a *practice*: something you *cultivate*, you *sustain*, you *return to*. It is closer to a posture of the heart that you re-inhabit on Monday morning than to a passing emotion. Some days it will be vivid; some days tired; the practice is to keep orienting again, with no demand that every morning's orientation be equally radiant.
**Misreading 6: Hope is about *outcomes*.** No. The five hopes are about orientations toward *training*, *change*, *maturation*, *progress*, and *awakening*. The orientation itself is the practice; outcomes are calibrated in their own terms and on their own timescales. Hope in this sense is more about how one lives each moment than about how things turn out.
Where does this leave us? The *Mahāyāna-sūtrālaṃkāra* offers a vocabulary for hope that resists both the wishy-washy usage of everyday speech and the grandiose misuse that confuses aspiration with achievement. Hope, in this tradition's precise framing, is the *持续期求*—the sustained aspiration—a bodhisattva keeps alive across five sites at once: that the perfections grow, that the obscurations wane, that beings come to maturity, that the journey through the grounds advances, and that unsurpassed awakening remains the horizon. It is hard, it is patient, and it has more moving parts than most of our everyday hopes. Which is exactly why it doesn't wear out.